


if the best that we can hope for is revenge

by blackhorseandthecherrytree



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Dark, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-05-13
Packaged: 2017-12-04 11:02:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackhorseandthecherrytree/pseuds/blackhorseandthecherrytree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steph lives in othersideverse Gotham.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

Disclaimer: I don't own Batman. or Stephanie Brown, more's the pity.

* * *

 

The Browns live in a crappy tenement building on a crappy intercity street in the craphole of all crapholes, Gotham City. They have three rooms to their name: a master bedroom, Steph’s closet, and a living room that adjoins to a kitchenette. (They don’t count the bathroom. The toilet only works half the time.)

Steph doesn’t go home when she can help it. It’s depressing, and she never knows what mood her dad’ll be in. Besides, if he starts counting on her being there he’ll pull her into more and more of his schemes, and she’s not nearly stupid enough to do that. Who the hell wants to get shot in the head and left in a gutter?

It’s gotten rougher lately, since Bruce Wayne killed her mom’s brother. Steph doesn’t mind, because he was a creeper, but he was a ready scam for her dad. And her mom still cared about him, Steph doesn’t know why. If she were eighteen, she’d leave this house and never come back.

But until then, it’s a crappy school, with too many girls pregnant and too many people dropping out entirely and lockers that fall off their hinges as soon as you look at them and chalkboards that have been dusty since the 1930s. Literally.

She trudges up the last stair and freezes at the door. There’s yelling, which means her dad’s home. She thinks through her options. Yes, it’s too late to ask Jessica if she can stay over at her house, and if she goes back to the shelter they’ll call social services. Better to get it all over with at once, then.

It’s halfway down the hallway when she hears the  _pop_ ,  _pop_.

Steph’s never claimed to be the brightest bulb in the box. Even for her, though, rushing towards gunfire was a new low. Still, it was her home, her family. She only did what anyone else would’ve done, which was why when she finally jimmied the door open (how he didn’t hear her she’ll never know, the motherfucker’s supposed to have ears like a bat), she saw everything like a slow reel.

The bodies: Daddy, Mom. And him, standing by the window, a monstrosity in Kevlar padding and flowing nylon. He turns to look at her.

And then he plunges out the window.

-

After everything, it’s the broken window that pisses her off most. Gotham is fucking freezing in October.


	2. part 2a

It’s not the first family’s fault, not really. They’re actually pretty nice, all things considered. But ever since the state funeral for her parents, she’s walked around in a dull haze. Things don’t make sense like they used to. The only thing that makes her stop feeling blank is anger, and one black eye too many makes the family send her back.

“It’s not that we don’t care about you,” says Jen, with something like compassion. “It’s just that we can’t keep on caring for kids if they keep getting beaten up, however much the other guy deserves it. You understand?”

Steph shrugs, wears into the hole in her sneakers. “Yeah.” And there really isn’t much more to be said after that.

The second family, she isn’t so lucky. Charlie’s been in the foster care gig for years, he says. It’s easy money. He always gets a teenager to help out with the younger ones. You can do that, right, Steffy?

Steph breathes through her nose, and tries not to see red. Right, Charlie.

That’s a good girl.

She comes home with black eyes and nobody cares, but Charlie will give her a black eye himself if she comes home too late to cook dinner. According to him, his friends in the department will make sure nobody gives a shit. Freakin’ typical.

So typical, in fact, it feels almost normal. Steph finds herself coming home earlier, to watch over the kids. Charlie brings them home and then zonks out most nights, luckily. When he’s awake he’s a pain in the ass and a headcase to boot.

When she was younger, she’d wanted a little brother or sister. She’d wanted someone who’d get what her parents were like, someone she could conspire with, someone who’d listen to her. When she got a bit older, she got more realistic. She didn’t want someone else to have to deal with her dad’s shit. Now she’s listened to enough stories from the other kids to know that Gotham foster care is every kid for themselves. They’re all alone, even if they’re together. This will last for a year, two maybe. It won’t take long for one of them to move on.

But this – this can be nice. Steph learns how to comb kinky hair (right after a shower, and then styled; Jada’s only going to have to wash her hair once a week, the lucky brat). She learns how to make something besides mac and cheese, because someone has to worry about nutrition. She teaches Brian how to punch. She helps Stacy with algebra. When they all stay out of Charlie’s way, it’s almost okay, even if Brian is so withdrawn he barely speaks and Tad doesn’t respect anything unless you make him. (He’s scared of Charlie.) She teaches them her tricks for avoiding Charlie, how to hate and lie and get away with it. Some of the tricks are her dad’s, which feels weirdly right. She doesn’t get too attached, so it won’t hurt too much when they leave, but she gives them skills they can use to protect themselves, if they’re smart.

Every so often, she goes out and looks at the night sky over Gotham, and she wonders about the asshole who killed her parents. Her dad had it coming, yeah. But her mom wasn’t guilty of anything more than drug abuse. She was an addict, but she didn’t hurt people. Did she just get in the way? Was it just too much of an inconvenience for Wayne not to shoot? Did he think she was an accomplice? Did he just not bother to find out whether she was innocent or guilty?

Before…before, Steph would’ve said she was a fan of what Wayne was doing. Crazy motherfucker, but right. She’s seen this city. It’s never going to get any better unless somebody does something. That’s part of what makes her angry about this whole thing, that before this she would’ve said he was right. Now she just doesn’t know, because her mom is dead, and that’s not worth her father’s death. Even her father -

A batsignal flickers on over Drake Central. Steph goes inside.


	3. 2b

Inside, everything is chaos, from the tv blaring some commercial to the kids fighting over a toy. Steph goes to the kitchen. She can make spaghetti and meatballs, at least.  
  
Charlie’s in the pantry, getting something. Probably chips. Steph sighs, puts her keys on the table, and starts rooting around for a pot deep enough to boil pasta in. Of course it’s in the very back, behind everything else. When is it not?  
  
When she gets up, Charlie is staring at her in a way that makes her skin itch.  
  
“What, is my tag out? I hate it when that happens. Don’t tell me my tag’s out.”  
  
He blinks, because while Charlie’s a rough man, he’s not a particularly bright one. “Uh…no.”  
  
“Okay, then.” Steph slams the pot of water onto the stove a little forcefully. “Pass me the marinara sauce?”  
  
“Get it yourself.” He slams into her as he passes, and –  
  
There was a time when she was eleven and she didn’t understand why she was scared. She does now.  
  
Except she’s not scared. She’s bigger and stronger. Her fury is like lightning burning through her and trickling into her stomach to simmer and boil. But she makes herself settle down; she makes herself wait. It’s not a crime to be turned on by someone, she thinks. It’s only a crime if he acts on it.  
  
She gets the knife out to slice onions.  
  
-  
  
So nothing happens for a few days. Steph almost thinks she’ll be safe. She only has to last out until she gets sent back through the system.   
  
And how long will that take? Weeks? Months? If he wants her, is he ever going to let her go back? What will his connections do? Will the next guy be worse? She feels all wound up, just waiting for the next thing to go wrong. Waiting until it does. Waiting until it will.  
  
And then one day, it does. Except it’s not what she’s expecting.  
  
It’s the kitchen again, in-between commercial breaks, the chips and the pasta (she made spaghetti again, no meatballs this time, they cost too much at the supermarket as she tells Charlie again and again).  
  
It’s everything again, and it’s not what she’s expecting. So she kicks, and punches, and the kitchen knife slashes across his throat before she can think, the blood pouring out over the linoleum.  
  
-  
  
His body slumps to the ground, lifeless.  
  
-  
  
She has blood all over her shirt.  
  
-  
  
 _What did you do, Steph?_  
  
-  
  
She can’t go to jail. Judge Dent will send her to Arkham for sure, and who knows what else will happen between the jail and the asylum?  
  
 _Once a thief, forever a thief_ , she can hear him saying.  _Once a killer, always a killer_. Gotham isn’t known for its mercy.  
  
-  
  
The first rule of all cons is: cover your ass.  
  
-  
  
She has to get Charlie out of here. The kids can’t see the – the body. She has to – the car. It’s in the garage. Trash bags, Charlie always gets the big ones. Charlie –  
  
-  
  
Steph reaches behind her for the jar of marinara sauce, and drops it on the ground. “Whoops,” Steph calls breathlessly. “Guys, don’t come in here. There’s broken glass.”  
  
-  
  
He had it coming.  
  
-  
  
She isn’t eleven years old anymore. She has to be a grown-up about this, she thinks, as she takes off her shoes and walks footprintless to the garage to get the garbage bags. She’s killed a man. She was scared, and she killed him, and he was an asshole but he hadn’t actually done anything yet, and -  
  
-  
  
She isn’t eleven years old anymore. She isn’t scared. But she was.  
  
And if he was going to hurt her, who else would he hurt? Who else had he hurt? How much had he gotten away with?  
  
-  
  
His blood is still splattered all over her shirt. Steph pulls it off, and stuffs it into the bag with the corpse.  
  
-  
  
The kids are still hungry. Someone has to feed them.  
  
-  
  
There’s going to be a body in the back of Charlie’s car that someone has to take care of.  
  
-  
  
They say the Bat can sniff out a crook by their sweat. They say that he can look at a crime scene and know exactly everything that happened. And she knows, personally, that he cares more about punishment than justice.  
  
She has to get rid of Charlie’s body. And then she has to disappear.


	4. 3

The streets are cold, wet, and dirty. Spring’s coming sometime, but it doesn’t feel like it’s coming anytime soon, and Steph’s been living out here since the middle of March. She’s pretty sure this is the worst decision she’s ever made in her entire life. But it’s not like there’s any turning back now.  
  
She ditched the car. She doesn’t know where to get new license plates, and she knew that keeping a stolen vehicle would get her caught sure as anything. She took the coupon book, though. It’s lasted longer than she thought it would, and it makes it easier to feel okay about pickpocketing. When you’re homeless, you do what you’ve gotta do to stay alive.  
  
She tries not to mind that, at this rate, she’ll never graduate high school.  _Even Daddy managed that_.  
  
But the one thing that keeps her going is anger. At her situation, at the other kids on the street, at Charlie, at her dad for bringing the Bat down on them, at her mom for not being able to leave her dad, at Gotham for being the way it is. Some days it feels like she’s just angry at everything, and she can’t stop. She can’t stop herself, but she also can’t stop any of the bad crap from happening. Everything just gets more terrible.  
  
She stabs the first guy who tries to mug her. It doesn’t feel any better or worse than Charlie, just easier. And then she stabs the next guy, and the next, a whole graveyard of corpses in the gutters that nobody cares about because they were poor and homeless and shiftless and probably the Bat got them, so what else is new.  
  
It’s a good month before she realizes that she’s practicing for Batman. It doesn’t change much. She does change her methods slightly. She tries to make herself harder to track. She disappears better, plans better, watches better. She does, eventually, put on a costume for protection and disguise. But she keeps herself nameless because she’s not a hero, and people who aren’t heroes shouldn’t have names,  _Bruce_. But mostly because Steph doesn’t want him to know she’s coming.  
  
The Bruce she makes up in her head is a man without shame or pity. He doesn’t care about the people who get in his way. He doesn’t see the difference between a victim and an aggressor. He doesn’t see people except as a compilation of innocent or guilty, and one mistake is enough to damn you for life.  
  
The Bruce in her nightmares is a demonic ghost-man, clad in shredded bat-wings and eating Gotham bit by bit. She can’t really see the difference.  
  
Steph’s not interested in dramatics. She knows she’s taken on a job too big for her britches. It’s not that she doesn’t want her Inigo Montoya moment, but she’s not sure she’ll get a chance to go through with it if he knows she’s coming.  
  
But she knows something nobody else knows, something she never told the therapists and policemen.  
  
She saw the Bat bleed.  
  
-  
  
He comes to this warehouse at varying times during the week. Steph went looking for info about it ever since she saw a guy she knows is working with him go in and not come out. She’s gotten a good idea of the rhythm of the place, if her informants can be trusted. She thinks they can be. Hopes they can be. Needs them to be.  
  
But the first time she saw her mark go in, she freaked out. And then she realized the potential. This is a start, she thinks. It’s the first thing she’s had that can lead her to the man she means to murder.  
  
The doors of the warehouse open. He waddles in, five mooks forming a semicircle around him – the only criminal in Gotham to keep his hands clean enough that even Bruce Wayne can’t find him guilty of anything.  
  
Steph shows off the gymnastics she’s been practicing, punches out his five bodyguards, and then bows.  
  
“Mr.Cobblepot, I have a proposition. What wouldn’t you give to have this city free of the Bat’s supervision?”


	5. part 4

Her position is a little uncomfortable. But that’s okay. Steph can deal with a little discomfort if it gets her closer to her goal, and her goal is coming.  
  
Penguin listened, for a shocker. She’d felt sure that he’d kick her out on the street, her gloves slick inside with sweat and panic. But he listened. And he bargained. And he made a deal.  
  
They’d put together the plot with their combined resources. He’d get Wayne to her location. The plan was hers.  _Nothing can trace back to me_ , he’d said.  _I will not be able to rescue you. You will live or die on your own._  
  
Steph’s okay with that, too. What’s important is that he gets Wayne here. She’ll take care of the rest. She’s long since had more than enough of expecting other people to come to her rescue.  
  
The cameras are cheap, but efficient. She has nightvision on the roof and on the streets and in the darkened warehouse, a filtered green glow on her screen. She’s pulled off her mask, for now, because the double nightvision is getting to her head and it’s hot inside there. She can’t breathe properly.  
  
But she’s close. So close. She’s done so much to get here. She’s done what she had to do. But none of it has been pleasant.  
  
Her hand clenches, and unclenches. She’s going to do this.  
  
And then?  
  
She doesn’t really have an answer.  
  
-  
  
He’s here.  
  
Steph slams her mask on, flips the goggles up, and readies the action.  
  
Okay, so it’s just the one camera. But – there again. The weight sensor. Definitely someone there. That dark shadow is moving against the others. She’s been slowly learning to trust her paranoia, and it is paying off tonight.  
  
“Steph’s Haunted House, up and at ‘em,” she murmurs as she started the first set of machine guns, synced to the sound of four tromping boots. The figure runs. She grins.  
  
…He’s following the directions she spray-painted. Which isn’t a bad thing, but she set up stuff in case he didn’t. She didn’t expect him to. He’s running right into every trap. Steph stares at the screen. And then it hits her.  
  
The figure’s all wrong, because that’s not Batman. He sent a goddamn decoy, he’s already here, he’s been watching her, he probably saw her face –  
  
The boy’s mask gets torn off, and she recognizes him as somebody she knows. Chris Owens. A lineback from GCHS. He fumbled the ball at the playoffs last year, and then he fumbled with Jessica. He probably knew he was dead before he even came in the building.  
  
She stands up and turns around. “I know you’re there.” There’s no initial response, so she keeps going. “You’ve made your point. You can come out now.”  
  
“Have I?” The man steps out of the shadows, a man who could’ve been anyone, except for the burning in his eyes. “Because I don’t think I’ve even started. What made you think you were good enough to beat me?”  
  
“I’m just a kid from Sprang River.” Behind her back and under her cloak, Steph thumbs her last resort trigger. “If I don’t believe I can do anything, nobody else will.” And then she runs for it.  
  
She doesn’t run far, of course, but she runs far enough. Deeper into the center of the warehouse and the maze of traps she’s set up. Steph tries to think back as she runs. What tipped him off? Did she get betrayed? Was it Penguin?  
  
It figures, actually, if it was. She was stupid for ever trusting him, stupid and not thinking straight. But she’s got her head in the game now. The adrenaline’s made the aching in her stomach go away. She can think.  
  
The bolo reaches her in the big old factory room. She stumbles over Chris’ body, and rolls to face the Bat. Steph’s going to die today, she knows. But she’s going to do it on her own terms. She’s going to talk herself to death, the way her teachers always told her she would.  
  
“Coward.”  
  
The man stalks toward her. Even here, even now, he’s like a panther or some kind of predator, gorgeous and graceful and balanced in the way he moves. Like the way Jackie Chan would move, if he were a tank. “You’re the one who ran.”  
  
“To get to better ground.” She starts cutting at the cord with her cheapo-deepo penknife. “Like you’ve never done that.” A red light beeps on behind him. Just fifteen seconds. She tries not to focus on what that’s going to feel like.  
  
“You’re counting.” He paces around her. Steph feels exposed, even with her mask on. “Why are you counting?”  
  
Steph’s voice goes shrill, even though she doesn’t want it to. “I’m not counting.” He’s on to her, he can’t be on to her, please don’t be on to her plan…  
  
Wayne is behind her when he grabs her and grapples out, just before the dynamite blows.  _Fuck_ , Steph thinks. She catches the force of the blow and collapses where he drops her, coughing and wheezing.  
  
It might be just the head trauma, but she’s pretty sure the big bad Bat sounds confused. “Why were you willing to kill yourself in order to kill me?”  
  
She laughs. Coughs up something wet and sticky. Laughs some more. “You killed my parents, you son of a bitch.”  
  
That’s when she blacks out.  
  
-  
  
Heaven is not a hospital room. Steph may never have paid much attention in her grandma’s church, but she does know that. Also, she’s tied to an I.V. She’s pretty sure no heaven would include that.  
  
Steph uses the I.V. stand as a crutch to get up and go to the bathroom. Once there, she looks at herself in the mirror.  
  
She has a black eye. There’s a bandage around her head. Under her shirt, she has more, and a cast on one arm. Breathing is hard.  
  
She survived. She failed, but she’s still here. Steph feels like crying and screaming and swearing and breaking down, all at once. It is the worst pain in the world, even through the medication she must be on. (And who's going to pay for that, hmm?)  
  
But Steph is a survivor. A go-getter. If she fails, she is strong enough to pick herself back up and do it better. Failure is an opportunity, she remembers from gymnastics. Every failure is a chance to fix your mistakes. Quitters never win, and winners never quit. And Bruce Wayne made a mistake when he left her alive.  
  
She survived. She’ll heal. She’ll learn from her mistakes. And one way or another, she’ll find a way to kill the bastard. Because nobody lives forever, not even asshole superhuman murderers. There has to be some kind of justice in the world.  
  
Right?  
  
 _Finis._


End file.
